A writer I've always truly admired, Henry Miller, and his sometime lover and general partner in crime Anais Nin, both spent a lot of their writing lives analyzing and agonizing over Miller's second wife, June. She comes off as a truly fascinating person in both Mary V. Dearborn's wonderful The Happiest Man Alive (about Miller) and Deirdre Bair's Anais Nin: A Biography, and in her various guises and amalgamations with other women in Miller's own books. She comes off as pretty much a really messed-up muse for a messed-up pair in a messed-up century; I am pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to stand her as I have a very low tolerance for drama queens (of either sex).
There is perhaps something to the fact that Miller, at least, did most of his best writing while he was suffering the most from what June did to or with or without or despite him -- the three-volume Rosy Crucifixion is mostly a reaction to his time sharing an apartment with her and a lesbian lover of hers -- and from what I'm discovering so far in the Nin biography she, too, owes a lot to this exasperating cokehead.
Real-life muses are nothing new, of course. I think just off the top of my head of how all the Pre-Raphaelites seemed over and over to do portraits of Elizabeth Siddall in their paintings as an example.
The question in my mind is now, who is the most fascinating person in my own life? Whose real-life (or imagined) adventures could best sustain a novella (for such is what NaNoWriMo has us producing, 175 pages, 50,000 words)? I am truly blessed in that there are several. One of my friends could be a Wild West Orlando (as in Virginia Woolf's hero/heroine, not as in Bloom or Furioso); another is a walking soap opera (that would have to be on HBO)... another... oh, there are so many possibilities.
I've got a month yet to think about this. And think about it I will.
30 September, 2006
Housekeeping...
Just so my readers (?) understand a few things...
Technology has somewhat passed me by; at home I still connect to the internet via 1) A dial-up connection and 2) an original tangerine Ibook running OS 9.something, which means that Blogger, among others, no longer really lets me do anything from home. Lucky for me, at work I have access to a T1 line and shockingly up-to-date PCs, so I can post here. HOWEVER, I only work four days a week.
SO...
From now on, I will post the "actual" date upon which I wrote an entry as part of the entry's title. For example, the previous entry (which I have now corrected), will now be "Anais Nin: A Biography 27 September". The post date I cannot change, and it will only reflect the moment at which I managed to pull the text up off an email to myself at work and throw it up here.
Such it must be until the day I find the financial and spiritual wherewithal to do something about my home internet situation which won't be anytime soon...
Technology has somewhat passed me by; at home I still connect to the internet via 1) A dial-up connection and 2) an original tangerine Ibook running OS 9.something, which means that Blogger, among others, no longer really lets me do anything from home. Lucky for me, at work I have access to a T1 line and shockingly up-to-date PCs, so I can post here. HOWEVER, I only work four days a week.
SO...
From now on, I will post the "actual" date upon which I wrote an entry as part of the entry's title. For example, the previous entry (which I have now corrected), will now be "Anais Nin: A Biography 27 September". The post date I cannot change, and it will only reflect the moment at which I managed to pull the text up off an email to myself at work and throw it up here.
Such it must be until the day I find the financial and spiritual wherewithal to do something about my home internet situation which won't be anytime soon...
29 September, 2006
Anais Nin: A Biography -- 27 September
I was going to devote this, my sophomore post to FictionFast2006, to my newfound obsession with the Bialowieza forest. I'd never even heard of the place before reading about it in Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory, a big book of meditations on history as it is appears from the perspective of the forests, rivers and rocks in which events take place, and it's a reflection of Schama's own able communication of his passion for the place, which figures prominently in both his mother's and father's family histories, as well as my own general liking for groves and glades and old deciduous forests that I'm so taken with the desire to learn more about the place.
The first way in which I acted on this desire was, naturally, to see if Netflix offered a DVD of the TV program this book is meant to accompany. It does not; it appears no such DVD exists.
As this reading and Bialowiezamania predate my FictionFast resolution, I next turned to narrative film for more images (especially since some great ass had torn quite a lot of the color plates out of the public library's copy of Landscape and Memory) of the forest at least. Bingo! A big epic film of the poem Pan Tadeusz, which promised to be chock full of treeporn. It delivered.
But as I say; I was going to write about Bialowiesza, but that's before something truly wonderful happend.
Two days after my first post to this blog was my first trip to the library to bring in a wholly fiction-free haul (though I'm not yet done with Michel Houellebecq; I read several books at a time and must confess to a certain urge to make this, my last novel for months, linger a bit). The new books section had little to tempt me; the non-fiction titles tending towards the stuff-that-makes-me-roll-my-eyes like anguished parenting memoirs and cheesy self-help books, on one hand, and stuff-I'd-already-read on the other (recent "new non-fiction shelf" raves: a biography of Robespierre, Michael Pollan's big paen to elitist eating [that still has changed the way I eat, even though I'm a prole in the heart of prole-land] [though there is grass-fed beef to be had in plentitude, and trout, thank goodness], everybody's favorite sexy revisionist economics tome of the moment, and a look at the Gospel of Judas written by one of the powers behind the publication of the Nag Hammadi Library), which made me nervous.
I have a habit these days, though, of making the effort to actually keep track of books I hear about on NPR or catch interesting reviews of in Arts and Letters Daily online or the handful of magazines to which I subscribe (Reason, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, City Journal and Bookmarks, currently -- the former two because I couldn't afford to subscribe to the Economist, the latter because Amazon.com recommended it. So far I'm not too impressed with Bookmarks, but I've only had two issues) and use my copious but sporadic downtime at work to log on to my local public library's online category and get the call numbers for same, so choice number one was easy: Thomas Power's Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies. Not a new book, that, but one I'd often noticed on the shelf while grabbing other tomes to feed other obsessions like water issues.
Schama has proven an even more engaging read than he has been a TV presence and so Volume 2 of his History of Britain (I'd just turned in Volume 1) was another easy choice.
That was only two, though, and while I still had Houellebecq and a locally published history of a mining ghost town in Western Wyoming at home, I have a sort of silly and neurotic need to have a formidable stack of library books next to my easy chair (extra silly when one considers that I also possess a considerable private library of my own, last count well over 1000 volumes of everything from Attic poetry to college physics to the complete poems of Hart Crane to an ever-more-complete collection of Horizon magazines from the 1960s, the last, I maintain, in themselves sufficient to provide a pretty good liberal arts education to the reader willing to take in all they have to offer). I Needed More.
I'm not religious but I do occasionally send a grateful thought the way of the Angel of Biography (the Lesser Zadkiel, I believe he's called, from what I read in Robertson Davies) who, if he exists, is a disembodied spirt of great potency, goading hundreds and hundreds of first rate writers (and many more crappy ones) to take a good stab at writing accounts of each other's and others' lives for posterity. I even did my Senior Project on biography, focusing on good old Edmund Gosse (too bad by that time I was more interested in the father's pursuits than the son's but that's for another post). My local library has a nice big (relatively speaking) biography section that's always good for a read or two and fun to browse, laughing at the proliferation of hagiographies of halfwit politicians and sports stars, wondering if some day I'll be desperate enough to read any of the movie star biographies given my general hatred of the breed, nodding always at old favorites that I already know well and own like Mary Dearborn's study of Henry Miller, Victoria Glendenning's of Vita Sackville-West, Churchill's memoirs and Lord Byron's letters and good old Boswell and Plutarch and James Gleick and Saint Theresa of Avila.
Closing time approaching, I decided on a study of C.S. Lewis by William Griffin and Deirdre Bair's look at Anais Nin, the last turning out to be the best of the lot as far as my original purpose in starting the grand design of which FictionFast2006 is a part.
Nin is probably the most famous diarist in the world, and to write about her is to write about her diaries, her obsession with writing (and re-writing them), the question of how truthful she was (or anyone is) in them, the phenomena of publishing them, diary diary diary, I wonder if the word does not in face appear on every page!
Next thing I knew, I had put the book down and picked up my own, a big fat journal I was given as a guilt gift about a year and a half ago but never touched. I seem to be keeping a diary again, and I have the writer's cramp to prove it! Which makes typing this blog entry slightly uncomfortable, but, as they say, oh well.
So FictionFast is off to a promising start.
The first way in which I acted on this desire was, naturally, to see if Netflix offered a DVD of the TV program this book is meant to accompany. It does not; it appears no such DVD exists.
As this reading and Bialowiezamania predate my FictionFast resolution, I next turned to narrative film for more images (especially since some great ass had torn quite a lot of the color plates out of the public library's copy of Landscape and Memory) of the forest at least. Bingo! A big epic film of the poem Pan Tadeusz, which promised to be chock full of treeporn. It delivered.
But as I say; I was going to write about Bialowiesza, but that's before something truly wonderful happend.
Two days after my first post to this blog was my first trip to the library to bring in a wholly fiction-free haul (though I'm not yet done with Michel Houellebecq; I read several books at a time and must confess to a certain urge to make this, my last novel for months, linger a bit). The new books section had little to tempt me; the non-fiction titles tending towards the stuff-that-makes-me-roll-my-eyes like anguished parenting memoirs and cheesy self-help books, on one hand, and stuff-I'd-already-read on the other (recent "new non-fiction shelf" raves: a biography of Robespierre, Michael Pollan's big paen to elitist eating [that still has changed the way I eat, even though I'm a prole in the heart of prole-land] [though there is grass-fed beef to be had in plentitude, and trout, thank goodness], everybody's favorite sexy revisionist economics tome of the moment, and a look at the Gospel of Judas written by one of the powers behind the publication of the Nag Hammadi Library), which made me nervous.
I have a habit these days, though, of making the effort to actually keep track of books I hear about on NPR or catch interesting reviews of in Arts and Letters Daily online or the handful of magazines to which I subscribe (Reason, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, City Journal and Bookmarks, currently -- the former two because I couldn't afford to subscribe to the Economist, the latter because Amazon.com recommended it. So far I'm not too impressed with Bookmarks, but I've only had two issues) and use my copious but sporadic downtime at work to log on to my local public library's online category and get the call numbers for same, so choice number one was easy: Thomas Power's Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies. Not a new book, that, but one I'd often noticed on the shelf while grabbing other tomes to feed other obsessions like water issues.
Schama has proven an even more engaging read than he has been a TV presence and so Volume 2 of his History of Britain (I'd just turned in Volume 1) was another easy choice.
That was only two, though, and while I still had Houellebecq and a locally published history of a mining ghost town in Western Wyoming at home, I have a sort of silly and neurotic need to have a formidable stack of library books next to my easy chair (extra silly when one considers that I also possess a considerable private library of my own, last count well over 1000 volumes of everything from Attic poetry to college physics to the complete poems of Hart Crane to an ever-more-complete collection of Horizon magazines from the 1960s, the last, I maintain, in themselves sufficient to provide a pretty good liberal arts education to the reader willing to take in all they have to offer). I Needed More.
I'm not religious but I do occasionally send a grateful thought the way of the Angel of Biography (the Lesser Zadkiel, I believe he's called, from what I read in Robertson Davies) who, if he exists, is a disembodied spirt of great potency, goading hundreds and hundreds of first rate writers (and many more crappy ones) to take a good stab at writing accounts of each other's and others' lives for posterity. I even did my Senior Project on biography, focusing on good old Edmund Gosse (too bad by that time I was more interested in the father's pursuits than the son's but that's for another post). My local library has a nice big (relatively speaking) biography section that's always good for a read or two and fun to browse, laughing at the proliferation of hagiographies of halfwit politicians and sports stars, wondering if some day I'll be desperate enough to read any of the movie star biographies given my general hatred of the breed, nodding always at old favorites that I already know well and own like Mary Dearborn's study of Henry Miller, Victoria Glendenning's of Vita Sackville-West, Churchill's memoirs and Lord Byron's letters and good old Boswell and Plutarch and James Gleick and Saint Theresa of Avila.
Closing time approaching, I decided on a study of C.S. Lewis by William Griffin and Deirdre Bair's look at Anais Nin, the last turning out to be the best of the lot as far as my original purpose in starting the grand design of which FictionFast2006 is a part.
Nin is probably the most famous diarist in the world, and to write about her is to write about her diaries, her obsession with writing (and re-writing them), the question of how truthful she was (or anyone is) in them, the phenomena of publishing them, diary diary diary, I wonder if the word does not in face appear on every page!
Next thing I knew, I had put the book down and picked up my own, a big fat journal I was given as a guilt gift about a year and a half ago but never touched. I seem to be keeping a diary again, and I have the writer's cramp to prove it! Which makes typing this blog entry slightly uncomfortable, but, as they say, oh well.
So FictionFast is off to a promising start.
25 September, 2006
So it begins
I have participated in the now-almost-venerable National Novel Writing Month four times in the last six years, but only won the first year, for various pathetic reasons.
Over the years I have at various times run across the notion that those who wish to create fiction should themselves abstain from, or at least moderate, their consumption of others' fiction.
I literally cannot remember a time in my life when the printed English page was a mystery to me, and have been a complete fiction junkie since first my mother read to my sister and I... Right now the book that stands out from this time is Thom Roberts' The Magical Mind Adventure of Hannah and Coldy Coldy for some reason, but I've probably not even thought of that book in 30 years. Probably some kind of .Griffths Consistent History thing -- my personal Griffithimacator obviously being set on shuffle...
Which brings me to my last dose of literary fiction, which I did not choose to be my last but was rather just the piece I happened to be reading when I came up, only hours ago, with this idea/resolution/long slow path to madness. It is The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq, a book I chose out of curiosity not about the "controversial French author dude who's being compared to Camus or Celine" in circles far from mine, but rather about this guy who has just recently published a biography of H.P. Lovecraft that everybody I don't know but wish I did is talking about.
At any rate...
As anyone who knows of Houellebecq (and for those who don't, well just check out the name, the spelling of which I keep having to verify by checking the book cover) can already imagine, this is quite a book from which to launch on a fiction fast, loaded up as it is with entomologically, biochemically, mathematically, physically precise descriptions of the decay of dead bodies, the development of breasts and, if the jacket copy do not lie, an engineering project that makes dead bodies and breasts irrelevant to human consciousness or some such -- that last bit being the most fictional aspect of the book (I'm always, aren't you, a little curious whenever new books get published with the phrase "a novel" right on the cover. Says all kinds of strange things about what the modern publishing industry thinks of our credulity as book buyers [or in my case, inter-library loan harpies], doesn't it?). Which is a long way of saying that it could easily be argued that my fast has already sort of begun, maybe. We shall see. I'm only on Chapter 12 "A Balanced Diet."
So, once I'm through this one, no more novels/comic books/magazine short stories until after I've completed my 50,000+ words in November.
Ah, but what indeed about my viewing habits, the canny might ask?
First of all, I'm part of that small and shrinking population who neither subscribes to cable or satellite nor fusses with rabbit ears or other devices that would permit me to take in free or pay TV. I have a set, but it is hooked up to A) A VCR and B) A Sony Xbox, meaning that I exercise total control over what it plays and when it plays it, pulling programming from my personal library of VHS/DVD goodness, the wonderful world of Xbox games, and Netflix, now offering levels of subscription that allow one to have as many as nine movies out at a time. Ever the seeker after moderation, my account allows for seven, which is just about right.
I just, therefore, spent a good 45 minutes or so rearranging my humongous queue (over 400, which means I'm good to go, at current usage patterns, for a good year and a half of viewing over all) so that all the documentary films and non-fiction series collections are now on top. Lost: Season 2 will have to wait, as will Battlestar Galactica 2.5 and that Fassbinder film I finally decided to have a peek at. My Night at Maud's has been postponed for several months. I must content myself with films about, rather than by, Werner Herzog (lucky for me, there are plenty of both!).
David Attenborough and Simon Schama, Ken Burns and Michael Palin, James Burke and Godfrey Reggio, Nova and Frontline and National Geographic will dominate my screen for a while -- and I think it will be all right. Schama especially is already a big part of my current intake, as his Landscape and Memory currently sits in my bookbag along with the Houellebecq and with Yellowcake Towns by Michael Amundson, which I picked up for information and inspiration for my projected NaNoWriMo novel this year, set in a Wyoming boomtown in the 1970s (at least until I change my mind about everything and set it on the moon instead) (or in an alternate natural history of the Platte Valley) (or something else).
Can I do it? Will I bother? Watch this space and see!
Over the years I have at various times run across the notion that those who wish to create fiction should themselves abstain from, or at least moderate, their consumption of others' fiction.
I literally cannot remember a time in my life when the printed English page was a mystery to me, and have been a complete fiction junkie since first my mother read to my sister and I... Right now the book that stands out from this time is Thom Roberts' The Magical Mind Adventure of Hannah and Coldy Coldy for some reason, but I've probably not even thought of that book in 30 years. Probably some kind of .Griffths Consistent History thing -- my personal Griffithimacator obviously being set on shuffle...
Which brings me to my last dose of literary fiction, which I did not choose to be my last but was rather just the piece I happened to be reading when I came up, only hours ago, with this idea/resolution/long slow path to madness. It is The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq, a book I chose out of curiosity not about the "controversial French author dude who's being compared to Camus or Celine" in circles far from mine, but rather about this guy who has just recently published a biography of H.P. Lovecraft that everybody I don't know but wish I did is talking about.
At any rate...
As anyone who knows of Houellebecq (and for those who don't, well just check out the name, the spelling of which I keep having to verify by checking the book cover) can already imagine, this is quite a book from which to launch on a fiction fast, loaded up as it is with entomologically, biochemically, mathematically, physically precise descriptions of the decay of dead bodies, the development of breasts and, if the jacket copy do not lie, an engineering project that makes dead bodies and breasts irrelevant to human consciousness or some such -- that last bit being the most fictional aspect of the book (I'm always, aren't you, a little curious whenever new books get published with the phrase "a novel" right on the cover. Says all kinds of strange things about what the modern publishing industry thinks of our credulity as book buyers [or in my case, inter-library loan harpies], doesn't it?). Which is a long way of saying that it could easily be argued that my fast has already sort of begun, maybe. We shall see. I'm only on Chapter 12 "A Balanced Diet."
So, once I'm through this one, no more novels/comic books/magazine short stories until after I've completed my 50,000+ words in November.
Ah, but what indeed about my viewing habits, the canny might ask?
First of all, I'm part of that small and shrinking population who neither subscribes to cable or satellite nor fusses with rabbit ears or other devices that would permit me to take in free or pay TV. I have a set, but it is hooked up to A) A VCR and B) A Sony Xbox, meaning that I exercise total control over what it plays and when it plays it, pulling programming from my personal library of VHS/DVD goodness, the wonderful world of Xbox games, and Netflix, now offering levels of subscription that allow one to have as many as nine movies out at a time. Ever the seeker after moderation, my account allows for seven, which is just about right.
I just, therefore, spent a good 45 minutes or so rearranging my humongous queue (over 400, which means I'm good to go, at current usage patterns, for a good year and a half of viewing over all) so that all the documentary films and non-fiction series collections are now on top. Lost: Season 2 will have to wait, as will Battlestar Galactica 2.5 and that Fassbinder film I finally decided to have a peek at. My Night at Maud's has been postponed for several months. I must content myself with films about, rather than by, Werner Herzog (lucky for me, there are plenty of both!).
David Attenborough and Simon Schama, Ken Burns and Michael Palin, James Burke and Godfrey Reggio, Nova and Frontline and National Geographic will dominate my screen for a while -- and I think it will be all right. Schama especially is already a big part of my current intake, as his Landscape and Memory currently sits in my bookbag along with the Houellebecq and with Yellowcake Towns by Michael Amundson, which I picked up for information and inspiration for my projected NaNoWriMo novel this year, set in a Wyoming boomtown in the 1970s (at least until I change my mind about everything and set it on the moon instead) (or in an alternate natural history of the Platte Valley) (or something else).
Can I do it? Will I bother? Watch this space and see!
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